Good Freaking Riddance to American Idol.
After 15 long seasons, and about 12 years after the novelty
wore off, the world’s most successful television musical “talent” contest is
getting its mostly-unheralded final sendoff at the end of this season.
I was never a fan. I
don’t relish in the look of others embarrassing themselves, or being allowed to
for sport the way the AI producers did, or the way that Simon Cowell would
“honestly” appraise their performances.
Even most of the good performances were, at best, products of wannabes
who most people knew would probably not “make it”. Sure, the show produced a few substantial
and notable careers: Kelly Clarkson, Clay Aiken, Carrie Underwood, and a few others come to
mind. But to me, the show seemed like
more than simply a talent show to Big Music, especially considering how seriously it was
taken by the music industry in search of the next “major recording star” as
Clive Davis put it after the near debacle of season 3.
I saw American Idol as, essentially, a way for the music
business to “outsource” their A&R work.
By this, I mean that rather than having A&R representatives listen
to countless demo tapes, go to countless nightclub gigs, and otherwise trying
to find the proverbial needle in a haystack, why not have the potential
“needles” come to you in the form of a television show, seen by millions every
week, and a promise of a recording contract and, for the winner, a guarantee of
$1-2 million? You didn’t even have to
win the show itself in order to succeed – Clay Aiken didn’t, neither did
Jennifer Hudson. Exposure was what
counted, and the longer you stayed, the more exposure you got, and the greater
the chance of landing that holy grail known as a major-label record deal and
all that such a contract entails. So
the record companies get free A&R work as well as an artist or few artists
who, by their exposure, are guaranteed to sell x number of copies of their
debut album. That sounds like good
business, and is probably why the show stayed on the air as long as it did – it
was basically Fox Television and the general public doing Big Music’s market
research for them.
The risk to the industry, of course, was that the people
would vote for somebody they didn’t want.
To wit, remember the website votefortheworst.com? They succeeded in this game for a long time,
propping up singers that, in all honesty, should have gone home much earlier
than they did. Remember Sanjaya Malakar
and Jasmine Trias? These singers were
among many that benefited from this site’s “appreciation.” (I loved that site, not only for this
gum-up-the-music-industry-works approach, but for their honest and accurate
appraisal of what AI really was.)
So Big Music will now have to go back to the old-fashioned
way of discovering new talent. Worn
shoe leather, burning eardrums from all of the bad demo tapes, and countless
viewings of Youtube (who inflicted Justin Bieber on the world) and .mp4 videos,
are now back to being the rule.
To wit, as a closer, check out what Rob Cavallo said toward
the end of this video, about how to tell if somebody is really ready to be
signed. It’s toward the end – and its so
very true.
